The Thirty Years War

By J. V. Polisensky

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520332058

J. V. Polisensky

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THE THIRTY YEARS WAR

THE THIRTY

YEARS WAR

J. V. POLIŚENSKÝ

translated from the Czech by

Robert Evans

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles 1971

First published in English 1971

© J. V. Polisénskÿ 1971

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

ISBN: 0-520-01868-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-89894

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

Contents

Contents

1 Europe in a Century of Crisis and Revolution

2 The World at the Turn of the Century

3 The End of Equilibrium and First Attempts to Resolve the Crisis

4 The Bohemian War: the Local Conflict and its Wider Importance

5 The Dutch Period of the War, 1621-5

6 The Danish War and the Rise of Wallenstein

7 The Swedish War and the Fall of Wallenstein, 1631-5

8 New Horizons and New Miseries

9 The Compromise and the Peace

10 The Peace and its Consequences

Notes on Literature and Sources

Appendix

Index

1 Europe in a Century of Crisis and Revolution

The year 1567 has traditionally been seen as the beginning of the armed uprising of the Dutch Estates against Spanish government; exactly a century later, in 1667, it was in Amsterdam that the Moravian exile Jan Amos Comenius wrote the sorrowing pages of his Angel of Peace, a political treatise designed to reconcile the two great powers of the new commercial Europe, England and Holland, and to terminate existing trade war between them. It was England and Holland, but above all the latter, which Comenius all his life regarded as models of a purposive ordering of society and government; he thought it their task to crush the ‘universal monarchy’ of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs and safeguard the European corpus evangelicorum in a united and enlightened form. In them, and in Sweden whose links with them were close, he placed his hopes for the resurrection of an independent Czech state, that Bohemia which had been engulfed by the Habsburg ‘Babylon’ at the very beginning of the recent great war, the ‘Thirty Years War’ as contemporaries were already coming to call it.

In the late 1650s the first historian of what we now call the ‘English Revolution’ of 1640-60, Cromwell’s colleague John Rushworth, likewise began to perceive the broad connection between his own Civil War and the fateful events of 1618 in central Europe. His close associate in the service of the English Republic was Samuel Hartlib, a great friend of Comenius. Can it be coincidence that Comenius, Rushworth and Hartlib were all three capable, unlike historians of the Thirty Years War writing in the nineteenth century, of seeing the wider European significance in that conflict without being diverted by the distorting lens of nationalistic historiography?

The views of contemporaries were not of course readily adaptable to the liberal and chauvinistic models of thinking current in the last century, which looked down with a feeling of superiority on the ‘passions of religion’ and with incomprehension on all phenomena transcending the purely national. Perhaps we, the generation of two world wars, can for this very reason penetrate more deeply than our predecessors into such 300-year-old problems. That is far from saying that we understand them. On the contrary it is correct to say, as Pierre Daix wrote recently: ‘Our knowledge of the seventeenth century, whether of France or of Europe as a whole, is minimal and vitiated by many constantly repeated errors; it is high time the whole position was changed? Daix seems also to be right in pointing out that historians of the social, economic and Marxist schools have been concerned primarily with the ‘more revolutionary’ sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and have cast little light on the seventeenth. The latter appeared to display none of the vitality of the European late Renaissance and the age of overseas expansion, none of the economic stimulus of the ‘price revolution’, still less the drama of the rise of the Western bourgeoisie under the influence of the Enlightenment, which led to the final struggle with the ancien régime in the French Revolution of 1789. But the superficiality of such an attitude has lately been stressed by several historians, among them Pierre Goubert, Robert Mandrou, Pierre Chaunu, B. F. Porshnev, N. A. Chistozvonov and M. A. Barg.

All accounts of the Thirty Years War have been influenced in some degree by the wider context of the whole evolution of European society and the importance of this within the narrowly political conflict, even where, as for example with S. H. Steinberg, they recognize only a war for continental hegemony which involved no changes in social structure. It has become fashionable today to speak of a ‘crisis’ which overtook Europe roughly during the hundred years between 1560 and 1660. The notion derives particularly from a study by the English Marxist historian E. J. Hobsbawm which appeared in the review Past and Present in 1954 and put forward the view that the seventeenth century was an age of ‘general crisis’. Hobsbawm’s conception was adopted and carried over into the political field by H. R. Trevor-Roper in 1959, and both articles called forth a discussion with the French historian R. Mousnier and the English hispanidst J. H. Elliott. Other contributions followed which drew parallels from Spain and Sweden (Michael Roberts), but the debate became concentrated increasingly on the crisis and its revolutionary outcome in Stuart England.

In 1965 the majority of these articles—though not all—were brought together in the book, Crisis in Europe 1560-1660 with an introduction by Christopher Hill Hill suggested that a number of conclusions could be inferred from the work done hitherto: 1. All western and central Europe witnessed in the seventeenth century an economic and political crisis; 2. this crisis manifested itself in different ways, and these merit individual attention; 3. the differences in the incidence of crisis must be explained by reference to social and political structures and to religious institutions and beliefs; 4. the results of the crisis in Holland and England, where political revolutions led to significant economic and social changes, were markedly different from the results in the rest of Europe, with France and Sweden occupying an intermediate position; 5. the history of Britain in this period can be clarified by comparison with the contemporary developments on the Continent, and vice versa, and in general sensible application of the comparative method by the historian is not only instructive but even approximates to the conditions of a laboratory experiment.

There is no doubt that the concept of a widespread European crisis, i.e. one within the very framework of feudal society, at least enriches our view of the past, and any historian of the seventeenth century must be grateful to Mousnier, Hobsbawn and Trevor-Roper for their attempts to cast light where till now so much has been darkness. But we must remember here that in the late 1940s the Soviet historian Vainshtein was already speaking of a ‘European crisis’, while at the same time (1949) the present author summed up his standpoint thus:

The history of diplomacy (during the Thirty Years War) is unthinkable without an explanation of the given social structure: if we do not first observe that Jacobean England was a society in transition and on the brink of revolution, then its politics will necessarily appear hopelessly chaotic. However important and interesting the relation between Bohemia and Britain before 1618, its significance cannot match that of the Czech-Dutch connexion in those years. For it was not England and France, but the Netherlands on the one hand and the Vatican and the Spaniards on the other who were the motive spirits in European politics in the years 1618-20. The example of the Dutch, relatively the most progressive contemporary state, illustrates most clearly rhe interrelation of European policy- naking and its socio-economic foundations on the threshold of the Thirty Years War.

The weaknesses of the collection Crisis in Europe 1560-1660 are obvious: its title makes a promise which the contents do not fulfil. In fact after the introductory generalizing study by Hobsbawm its discussion is exclusively of the seventeenth century and the period 1560-1600 is forgotten. It is anyway easy to find agreement that a ‘crisis* had in large measure overtaken Europe when no attempt is made to establish what the various authors understand by the word, or whether their definitions coincide. In this respect there may well be a repetition of the sad history of the ‘general crisis of feudalism*, which was first canvassed in 1950 by R. H. Hilton as applicable to the fourteenth and parts of the fifteenth century, but which later, even in the works of Hilton himself (viz. his A Mediaeval Society, 1966) passed into oblivion.

There are certainly still historians who follow Hobsbawm*s broad approach, according to which the crisis of the seventeenth century is the concluding and decisive phase of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a transition whose beginnings Hobsbawm places in the thirteenth century, but which according to him was not completed in some parts of Europe until after 1800. The majority of historians however fear that such an interpretation of the notion of ‘crisis* is so nebulous that it is scarcely conducive to any fuller understanding of the past. It would only be a logical extension of this to cast the term in the rôle of deus ex machina for explaining any kind of phenomenon over a period of a full 500 years. Not only could the Italian Renaissance be viewed as the outcome of a ‘general European crisis*, but the Hussite movement in Bohemia, the German and Swiss Reformations and even the Thirty Years War would qualify too.

Doubts about the Hobsbawm thesis have been expressed above all by Dutch historians, whose country has anyway been remarkably neglected in this general picture. With the single exception of the agrarian historian B. H. Sticher van Bath, they have doubted whether it is possible from the standpoint of the Netherlands, which were enjoying their ‘Golden Age’ in the seventeenth century, to speak of any ‘general’ crisis at that time. To this it may indeed be replied that die Dutch had already in the sixteenth century resolved their crisis by revolutionary means, and thus their history in the hundred years following was the exception which proved the rule, a new chapter in the passage from feudalism to capitalism.

hi my own opinion however, any interpretation of the Dutch revolt and the English Civil War as ‘successful resolutions of a crisis of transition’ presupposes that we have some clear idea what the crisis itself involved. Hill’s conclusions seem to me thoroughly sound if we sum them up thus: a crisis is the culmination of ever-deepening internal conflicts within the infrastructure of a given society, which leads to a sudden collapse of existing economic, social, cultural and political relationships, and whose consequence will be either regression-regional or general—or oil the other hand a powerful step forward in the development of that society. This means that there have existed, besides those crises which have issued in revolution, others, more restricted territorially, which proved to be abortive. To define crisis in this way as purely the culminating phase of a process, rules out applying it, at least in any precise sense, to the process itself; thus in practical terms we may speak of the period between the Dutch revolution of 1566-82 and the English revolution whose climax was in 1640-9 as characterized by crises limited both geographically to a single country, and socially to a single class. To yoke together, as does Ruggiero Romano in his book on the European crisis of 1619-22, (1962), a study of agricultural prices with far-reaching conclusions covering the whole of Europe, is an exceedingly risky proceeding.

A similar approach to Romano’s is followed by the Polish historian J. Topolski in The so-called economic crisis of the seventeenth century in Europe (1962), who argues from the situation in Poland, where after the years around 1600 a stagnation of the economy can be observed, passing into a regression which lasts until the middle of the eighteenth century. Topolski’s identification of crisis with stagnation and regression is methodologically unsound, since the latter are neither the only manifestations of crisis nor its necessary outcome, as M. Hroch and J. Petrán correctly observed in their critique of his book, published in the Ceskoslovensky Gasopis Historicity for 1964. Hroch and Petrán view the crisis as a direct result of the sharpening disparity between the development of factors of production and old productive relations, a disparity of European dimensions whose proportions are sufficient to destroy the existing status quo in one sector of society or another. On the basis of the same, hitherto available source material they reach the conclusion that the ‘general crisis of feudalism" can equally serve as a touchstone for evaluating developments in the Czech lands, whereas Topolski judged that there was no case for admitting any general weakening or slowing-down of economic advance in Europe as a whole. Topolski stresses rather the disproportions which already existed in sodai, economic and other spheres within individual countries, and which divided Europe into three camps: firstly, the lands with the greatest economic dynamic where the dissolution of feudal relations had proceeded furthest—England and the Netherlands; secondly, those where neither stagnation nor regression was observable—France, Scandinavia, Germany and the other countries of central and eastern Europe, induding Bohemia but not Poland; and finally the areas of regression—Spain, Portugal, Italy and Poland. A. Wyczański and A. Maczak have attempted to test Topolski’s findings, but no measure of agreement has been reached, either in Poland or elsewhere.

The only rational approach to the problem must surely be that of analysing concrete historical material in the light of a theory of feudalism which gives insight into the nature of the crisis of feudalism. Hitherto, researchers have all dilated on the crisis alone without explaining its own context. We may agree with Hroch and Petráfi that the general crisis which announced the beginning of the collapse of the old order of sodety, without itself being its concluding chapter, is a misleading starting-point for meaningful parallels between the crisis of feudalism and the problems of the protracted supplanting of the old system by the new; at the same time it seems probable that their results will also be subject to the same sobering process which we have already observed with R. H. Hilton. Where they both judge that it is not necessary to introduce the term ‘general crisis of feudalism" we may readily agree; nevertheless it is dear that for at least some years to come we are likely to encounter more and more of such theories, extended to embrace the regions of eastern Europe, like Henry Kamen’s ‘Reformation crisis’ of the sixteenth century, Joel Hurstfield’s trade cycle crisis of the years 1620-40 and Pierre Chaunu’s Civilization of Classical Europe (1966).

The standpoint of Chaunu, who follows Mousnier’s position to its logical conclusion, is worthy of attention. He is not only concerned with the crisis as a category of economic history, of ‘Europe in its second phase of development⁹, the phase of falling prices, stagnation and con* solidation, he regards as far more significant the positive achievement of these years in the history of thought. The ‘miraculous twenties’ of the seventeenth century are for him the cradle of Classicism, by which he means ‘that short period when the resolution of tragic tensions on the foundation of the Baroque led to perfect harmony and equilibrium, at least in the field of art’.

The Classicism of the seventeenth century is an art of revolution, the ‘mathematization’ of the world in its celestial orbit, a world which had never before felt so great and majestic, a moment when the ordering of society coalesced with a whole cosmology. Viewed from the social point of view it could be said that Classicism is a short spell of great longing, the longing which seized the bourgeoisie, briefly diverted from its own evolutionary struggle by its search for office in France and its slower advance in Holland in the years 1650-70.

It was perhaps because Chaunu’s bold thesis appeared in a series under the title Great civilizations that the author made no attempt to explain what he understood by civilization, and indeed scarcely used the term in his text at all.

It appears to me however that, unless we wish to remain blindly amassing economic facts, we must at the very least elucidate the relation between society and civilization. The latter I take to mean broadly a given stage in the evolution of society, such as has been defined successively by Morgan and Engels, Lucien Fèbvre and H. Marrou. Civilization is a complex of many phenomena, each of whose pans reflects one aspect of human society, and whose whole is defined by the mutual relations of those parts. It is not a valid objection to Chaunu that his Civilization of Classical Europe is in fact the history of l’Europe française in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that for him French ‘hegemony’ replaced that of Spain. The very notion of ‘hegemony’ is of course a concept drawn from politics and ‘ideology⁹: which is to say that the hegemony of France did not eliminate that of Spain through confrontation, but rather the absolutist Versailles of Louis xrv simply took over the function of the Castilian peso politico de todo el mundo, the political centre of gravity of the whole world. France was not a direct competitor to Spanish civilization, but a new form of society and state, such as had been forged in the United Provinces during their Eighty Years War from 1568-1648, and it inherited the Dutch ‘model’ thanks rather to the bankruptcy of the Dutch regent class in the middle of the seventeenth century than to the three wars between the Netherlands and the England of the Commonwealth and Restoration. Chaunu thus judges that it was France and England, or more correctly Great Britain, which divided world hegemony between them until the last years of the eighteenth century.

What caused the conflict between these two conceptions of civilization, these two approaches to the questions of life and death, society and the state, education and the processes of the mind? The answer is simple: the civilizations created their own ideologies, in other words there were developed in certain restricted areas (Spain and the Netherlands) conceptual attitudes which, while never embracing the whole breadth of those civilizations or even their most progressive aspects, became so far the support of certain forms of government that any attack on them was regarded as an attack on the state itself and its social framework. Within the given society these attitudes came to be placed before any other considerations, which were only allowed expression on condition that they remained subordinate to the ruling official doctrine. Thus it was the transformation of civilizations into ideologies which created the precondition for open conflict, and the danger of such a conflict was directly dependent on the stage which had been reached in the evolution of a ‘doctrine of state’.

Most historians who, willingly or unwillingly, have faced the fact of the ideological confrontation of our own century and asked themselves whether we are not ourselves reliving the events of 300 years ago as witnesses of a new Thirty Years War, are agreed that the conflict possesses a new and unpalatable topicality. The majority accept the view that the changes undergone by European society in the crucial years between 1618 and 1648 brought to a close a period which the Renaissance civilization of the small Italian urban states had inaugurateci , and ushered in through its series of crisis situations a ‘new age’ which may only now be ending. Hill and Porshnev, R. Mandrou and A. Tenenti, J. H. Elliott and J. Topolski agree that the changes were not limited to the political sphere, but involved radical shifts in economic life, religious observance and questions of taste; in short, they affected the whole life of the 500 million or so people who were then living on the earth, and that of their descendants.

What you are about to read is an attempt at a new and different account of the Thirty Years War, seen as an example of two civilizations in ideological conflict. The clash of one conception, deriving from the legacy of Humanism, tinged with Protestantism and taking as its model the United Netherlands, with another, Catholic-Humanist one which followed the example of Spain, becomes thus the point of departure for the development of political fronts and coalitions of power. It would be a crass oversimplification to contend that the War was a collision between the champion of capitalism and the bourgeoisie on the one hand, and the representative of the ‘old régime’ and feudal aristocracy on the other. These two models were merely the poles in a whole complex struggle, the centres around which were forged two powerful political camps, and the Netherlands played a leading rôle, always cautiously and as it were under compulsion, only until about 1630. Ten years after that the Spanish adversary had already for all practical purposes been eliminated, and England, while still looking to Holland as a model, was also beginning to see her as a potential rival. It belongs to the central theme of this book to examine how during the War new and modern prototypes were evolved by France and England, models for experiment both in parliamentary government and absolutism, economic advance and manufactory production, colonial expansion and unbridled repression of minorities at home, scientific progress, religious toleration and witchhunting. The traditional themes like the ‘war for European hegemony’, the fate of ‘Europe divided’, the relationship between Baroque and Classicism, will not be the centre of attention here, but this author considers that the present interpretation of the Thirty Years War can throw light on those problems too.

There is no need to stress that this is an endeavour which only takes as its starting-point the criticism of existing treatments of the War, above all the bold condensed account by C. V. Wedgwood which was published on the threshold of the Second World War. Although still being reprinted and widely acclaimed, Wedgwood’s book presents the history of the Thirty Years War as a portrait gallery of rulers, statesmen, diplomats and generals, who according to the author themselves controlled the destinies of the nations of Europe. What I have attempted to do in more recent years has been to alter the emphasis, to reconsider the motives for the conflict in the light of what could be established about socio-economic changes in central Europe and elsewhere. In this work there has been no question of a ‘revaluation’, but rather a testing of thesis and hypothesis from an openly Marxist position in the light of unexpectedly rich source materials which languished until 1945 rïæ family archives of central Europe and have only since become available for the purposes of research. For there is no other way in which historical investigation can develop than by linking its theoretical reflections with the practice of the historian’s trade, combining synthesis and analysis in the study of the more restricted, as of the most extensive, phenomena of the past.

2 The World at the Turn of the Century

I wish to introduce to you the three protagonists in the story which follows: the first is the whole population—perhaps 70 million—of the continent of Europe, at most an eighth of the total on the globe. At a time when only one person in two survived to reach maturity and no-one could expect to live more than 45 or 50 years, this means that the War touched the fates of at least 100 million individuals, since it was the exception for anyone already adult in 1618 to witness also the conclusion of hostilities in 1648. Figures are revealing, but they never tell the whole story, and the seventeenth century was anyway a pre- statistical age; from this mass of Europeans we shall only be able to distinguish and bring back to life a few ‘great individuals’. There are the same problems with the second protagonist, the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Bohemia, that half-federal, half-dynastic entity linking together Bohemia proper, Moravia, Silesia and the Lusatian duchies. The Bohemian state had at the beginning of the seventeenth century a population of approximately four millions, and this lent it in the context of its time almost the status of a great power. It seems however that the figure ceased to rise further during precisely this period, and signs of economic, social and political tension began to be manifest at the very moment when the fate of Bohemia and its people was becoming one of the central questions in the complex nexus of problems facing the diplomats of Europe. This ‘Europeanizing’ of the Bohemian crisis took place within a situation of great delicacy and carried with it both unsuspected opportunities and incalculable risks. Finally, there is our third protagonist: the inhabitants, now to be numbered in tens of thousands only, of a smaller region in south-east Moravia, which was the birthplace of Comenius and scene of some of Wallenstein’s aerivities ; more concretely still, the thousand people who lived in one small country town and its immediate neighbourhood.

To survey this whole continental scene we must necessarily take up a point of vantage. Considering what has been said about the European dimensions of the ‘Bohemian question’, and considering also the consensus among historians of culture that the Prague which was the residence of Rudolf II of Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, was at the same time one of the most notable cultural centres in Europe, I feel it justified to sketch in my subject from a Prague perspective.

PRAGUE AND EUROPE IN l600

For the years around 1600 we possess at once three impressions of Prague, as seen both by local artists and more particularly by visitors from the Netherlands. From the flat top of the Letnå hill, the Dutchman F. H. Hooghenberg depicted it in 1593 with the river Vltava winding through its narrow valley and caressing the ancient arches of the Charles bridge. His Renaissance landscape, drawn with true Venetian fidelity, shows the Imperial residence, the Hradschin, in profile only. The city of Prague, capital of Bohemia, Regni Bohemiae Metropolis, is cradled in the undulating folds of a typical Czech countryside, with the Little Town, Mala Strana, on the left bank, the district where most Italian, German and Dutch merchants lived, especially those mercatores aulici who supplied the court, and on the other side of the river the Old and New Towns. A woodcut view of Prague made by the Silesian Jan Willenberg in 1601 is taken from the Petrin scarp and shows the broad façade of the royal palace on the Hradschin together with the urban microcosm below. Finally, there is a large copper engraving dating from 1606, which was published by Aegidius Sadeler after a drawing by Filip van Bosche, cut by Jan Wechter and dedicated to the mayors, councillors and aidermen of all three towns of Prague. The three prospects are each enlivened with rafts on the river; Hooghenberg placed two citizens of Prague in his foreground, while his countrymen in 1606 drew in a crowd of small figures going about their business on the river and beside it, walking in the vineyards and gardens beneath the Petrin’s ‘Hunger Wall’, which had been built in an earlier age by the Emperor Charles rv to relieve unemployment and famine.

The towns of Prague represent a first and lowest level; the Hradschin and royal palace, inhabited by courtiers, nobles, foreign ambassadors and agents and their retainers, form a second one; while the heights of Pohorelec, Strahov and Petfin were symbols of a higher perspective which was probably hidden from the Emperor Rudolf and his ever-changing advisers and entourage. In the year 1600 Rudolf, the head of the Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg, the representative of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, King of Bohemia and Hungary, and Archduke of Austria, could not gaze down on the town from the windows of his palace without a feeling of pride, or at the same time a sense of great unease.

He had finally migrated to Prague in 1583, when he was 31 years of age. The first third of that span of life he had spent with his father Maximilian 11 and his mother Donna Maria, the daughter of Charles v (his parents were thus cousins, and some detect in this fact the cause of his neurosis and his state of psychical depression) in the hands of his Humanist educators, men like the botanist Clusius and the physician Crato. The second portion of his life till then had been passed at the sombre court of the ‘prudent monarch’, el rey prudente, Philip 11. In contrast to his father, Rudolf was not accompanied there by a group of his own contemporaries who might have been able to take over at his court from those who had been with Maximilian in Spain and the courtiers of the ‘Spanish party’. The consequences of this first became clear in 1584, the year after the Emperor moved to Prague, when on the initiative of the Papal nuncio Bonomi several representatives of the Catholic high nobility met together to discuss ‘by what means Prague and the whole of Bohemia might be brought back to the Catholic faith’. This ‘Roman’ faction derived support not only from the nuncio but from the Spanish ambassador, who was able besides to form a small ‘Spanish party’ from admirers of his country’s far from popular ideal of universal monarchy. The facción española rose to power only in 1599 when its leader, the ‘tall Hispan’ Zdenek Vojtëch Popel of Lobkovic, became Chancellor, the most influential if not the highest Bohemian office of state.

This however did not by any means signify that either the nuncio or the Spanish ambassador held decisive sway over Rudolfs European policies. Lobkovic was of less importance than the Emperor’s valets, and the nuncio Spinelli had to contend unsuccessfully for the soul of the monarch with the astronomer Tycho Brahe, the court literati like Typotius and Pontanus, and above all his artists, musicians and alchemists. This state of affairs was well-known to all Europe, and Barclay’s Satyricon, (a scandalous roman à clef lampooning the relations of nuncios, Venetian and other agents) conveyed the message that Rudolf was more interested in the works of his artists: Sadeler, B. Spranger, J. Heintz, the Hoefnagels and the rest, than in disputes over religion or political prestige. Of course, his art collections and ateliers were not far removed from the political stage, indeed they played their own considerable rôle upon it. In a book, the one surviving copy of which belonged for a time to the Protestant Humanist Caspar Domavius, we find described the works of art which were designed to glorify the essentially unheroic monarch who had brought with him from the court of Spain the gift of dissimulation and endless temporizing. It was for this reason that his attacks of ‘melancholy’ sometimes coincided with times when he was called upon to make some unwelcome decision. That happened frequently enough: Rudolf was especially unwilling to enter into a marriage with the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, the daughter of his uncle Philip II, until finally she became, at least in name, the wife of his brother Albert. This gave the Emperor a further reason for mistrusting Spanish policy, whose influence in central Europe he anyway regarded with disfavour. To the conflict in the Netherlands he remained neutral, and he refused to support the rather frivolous involvement of his young brother Matthias in the quarrel.

If however the Dutch question left him cold, to the frequent despair of the Spanish ‘orator’ at his court, he displayed more concern for the Eastern question. The year 1593 saw the beginning of the fifteen-year war with the Turks in the districts of Upper Hungary, i.e. modern Slovakia. After some initial successes the imperial advance was brought to a halt by 1599, and thereafter the frontier could only be maintained with the help of Spain, which supplied both money and troops for the offensive. But whether it was the units of the Turkish begs or the Walloon mercenaries of the Prince of Mansfeld who brought the greater damage to the peoples of the contested territories is a difficult question to answer, one which still provides a source of argument among Czech and Slovak, Austrian and Hungarian historians. In the view of Czech bourgeois publicists like the chronicler Daniel Veleslavin or his friend Kecin, a student of Bodin, what was required was a town militia to be organized against the Turks instead of the unreliable mercenaries; but the local brigades which were sent from Bohemia against the enemy scarcely distinguished themselves, and so the situation remained the same. One of the leaders of the Czech Brethren, Václav Budovec, a man well-known for his contacts with the centres of Calvinist culture in the West—Geneva, Basle, England, Holland and the French Huguenots, thought it necessary to put forward arguments against those who, according to him, had come to the false conclusion that the Christian powers were behaving worse than the Turks. Budovec employed the Ottoman threat as a weapon to urge all Christians to settle their differences. The Turkish ‘tyranny’ was however to him only a little worse than the potential tyranny of Spanish ‘universal monarchy’, and he found his ideal in a republic based on Estates.

The ‘Dutch question’ and the ‘Turkish question’ exemplify on the political plane the ever-aggravating confrontation around 1600 of three civilizations: the first the Islamic, the second the Mediterranean, Ibero-Italian and Catholic-Humanist, the third the maritime world of Protestant Humanism. According to the designs of Rudolf himself, his Imperial court in Prague was to realize the ideal, still mediaeval in conception, of a united and crusading Christendom. But his successes were negligible, and probably the most lasting of them was a purely military development. During the war with the Turks along the Upper Hungarian frontier there were evolved, besides the methods of warfare of the Spanish and Dutch as represented by Ambrogio Spinola and Maurice of Orange, the so-called ‘Hungarian tactics’, which consisted in modifying the Spanish compact masses of soldiery because not enough men were available, and relying instead, perhaps influenced by the Dutch example, on towns and well-defended lines, and the cheap light cavalry raised by the comitats.

In other respects however the Prague court was an international meeting-place for artists and men of letters, not only from Italy and the Netherlands, but also the whole continent north of the Alps. There was room in Prague for many conditions of men: Giuseppe Ardm- boldo from Milan, the Dutch artists de Vries and Hans von Aachen, the alchemists Kelley, Dee and Sendiwoj, Giordano Bruno and Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe and Jan Jessenins. Most of them were neither ‘Spanish’ nor ‘Dutch’ in their ideology, but seekers after new ways in philosophy, science, art, and not least politics. Towards questions of religion Rudolf revealed himself a pure agnostic, and he was quite openly resolved to play a rôle in politics. In this he hoped to realize a ‘third way*, a balance of power in Europe, for only thus could effective resistance be organized against the Turks. The Prague admirers of Mannerist art stood close in matters of religion to Erasmus of Rotterdam, while in their politics they were eclectic, and we can find among them students of Jean Bodin as of Justus Lipsius. In 1600 such hopes of a ‘third way’ in central Europe could still be considered respectable; succeeding decades were to sweep them totally aside.

But no-one could yet know this at the turn of the century. In the very year 1600 Prague welcomed an embassy from the Persian Shah, the prince of potentates, which included the English adventurer Anthony Sherley, the later renegade Don Juan de Persia and representatives from Muscovy, seeking support against the Porte or the Empire of Poland- Lithuania. The city was full of foreigners, and from England alone there were present at one time three groups of secret agents: one the ‘official’ envoys of Cedi, another the ‘Essexmen’, and a third the Scots from the court of James vi.